As a pariah state, threatened by much more powerful nations than itself and with weakening ties to its most important allies, North Korea has every reason to want nuclear weapons. The only threats strong enough to compel North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions are either military force or a crushing embargo from China.

Despite the unprecedented level of violence in North Korea’s recent rhetoric and actions, a close look at these actions suggest that rather than signaling a new aggressive policy, they follow North Korea’s time honored practice of increasing tensions to extract concessions. North Korea’s unwillingness to take action that will definitely lead to a military response suggests that at present it is uninterested in sparking a major military conflict.

With the recent calming of North Korean rhetoric, it appears as if the skeptics were correct in assuming that North Korea would not actually attack the United States or South Korea. However, with long-term goals on the line for Chinese and North Korean policy makers, they were successful in causing a hiccup in the progress […]

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) and North Korea have a complicated relationship built on similar ideology and mutual economic gain. In fact, Support began in the Korean war in the 50’s when china obviously supported other communist regimes. In 1961, the two countries signed the Sino-North Korean Mutual Aid and Cooperation Friendship Treaty, whereby […]

Praemon is proud to release this, the first Annual Threat Report. In addition to each student contributor’s regular pieces on varying national security issues, the Annual Threat Report (ATR) is a large-scale, collaborative analysis project. The purpose of the ATR is to identify the handful of threats that we, the members of Praemon, consider to […]